November 20th, 1967. Hill 875 near Dak To, Kontum Province. Private First Class Carlos Lozada is 35 m forward of his company’s perimeter when an entire North Vietnamese Army company appears on the trail below him. They close to 10 m before he opens fire, the length of a school bus, close enough to see faces.
His M60 delivers 550 rounds per minute, every fifth round a tracer, creating a wall of lead that no human being can walk through and survive. 20 enemy soldiers drop in the first burst. The assault stops, but the NVA do not retreat. They begin enveloping his position from three sides. They have been trained for this.
Kill the machine gunner first, and Lozada refuses to withdraw. Vietnam presented a suppressive fire crisis unlike any previous American war. In the triple canopy jungle of the Central Highlands, engagement ranges compressed to 25 m, sometimes 15. You fired at sound, at muzzle flash, at the smoke drifting from an enemy position you couldn’t see.
The Viet Cong appeared suddenly in numerically superior ambushes, 30 men hitting a squad of 12, and vanished into vegetation so thick that pursuit meant walking into another ambush. A rifle platoon needed overwhelming volume of fire in the first seconds of contact, not aimed shots, not precision marksmanship. >> [snorts] >> A wall of lead that forced enemy heads down long enough for the men caught in the kill zone to crawl to cover, to return fire, to survive.
The weapons American soldiers carried could not deliver it. The Browning Automatic Rifle had won World War II. It was still winning battles in Korea when many of the men who would carry it to Vietnam were learning to walk. But the BAR fed from a 20-round box magazine, and a trained gunner could empty that magazine in 2 seconds of automatic fire. 2 seconds.
Then you were a rifleman fumbling with a fresh magazine while the enemy kept shooting. The BAR could not change barrels. Sustained fire, the kind that suppresses an ambush, overheated the weapon until it failed. It was functionally a heavy automatic rifle, not a machine gun. In jungle warfare, where contact came sudden and close and required immediate continuous firepower, 20 rounds was not enough.
The M1919, a 6 Browning .30 caliber machine gun, could deliver sustained fire. It was belt-fed, water-cooled in its original configuration, capable of firing until the ammunition ran out, but it weighed 31 lb. With the tripod, 47. It required a five-man crew to move it through jungle terrain, and its barrel change procedure essentially required gutting the weapon under fire.
Too heavy, too slow, too cumbersome for a war fought in rice paddies and elephant grass, where contact came at arm’s length and decisions were measured in heartbeats. March 8th, 1965. Da Nang, Quang Nam province. Marines landing at Red Beach carried a mix of M1919 Brownings and the new M60 general-purpose machine guns that had been trickling into the infantry since 1959.
Within weeks, the Brownings were pulled from patrol duty. Too heavy for the terrain, too slow to deploy when an ambush erupted from the tree line. Men carrying World War II weapons were dying in a jungle war that demanded instant portable firepower. The M1919 was relegated to vehicle mounts and base defense, the last American conflict in which it would see front-line service. The M60 took over.
5 months later, Operation Starlite, the first major American offensive of the war. August 18th, 1965. Van Tuong Peninsula, Quang Ngai province. Company H, 2nd battalion, 4th Marines landed at LZ Blue near the village of Nam Yen. VC forces, elements of the 1st Viet Cong regiment, attempted to flank the Marines through dense vegetation.
Lance Corporal Ernie W. Wallace found himself in a situation the BAR could never have solved. Sustained suppression was needed against a moving enemy force in jungle so thick that targets appeared and disappeared in seconds. Wallace did something the old weapons could never have allowed.
He managed to separate them from the terrain and went after them with his M60 machine gun. Firing from the hip and shoulder, Wallace rushed enemy positions. His ammunition bearer, Private First Class Jim Carris, just 17 years old, fed the belts and kept the weapon running. Wallace accounted for more than 40 enemy dead before the day ended.
The BAR held 20 rounds. The M60 fed from 100-round belts and it kept feeding. Nearby, Private First Class John H. Boast of Company L, 3rd Battalion, 3rd Marines moved onto an exposed hilltop offering no cover whatsoever. He calmly emplaced his M60 as incoming fire shredded the vegetation around him, suppressing the enemy long enough for three platoons to advance.
For his actions that day, Lance Corporal Wallace received the Navy Cross. The gap between adequate and inadequate automatic fire was measured in bodies. A squad caught in ambush without sustained suppressive capability could not move, could not maneuver, could not do anything except die in place while riflemen tried to achieve with 20-round magazines what required belt-fed firepower. The M60 filled that gap.
But the weapon that solved the crisis did not emerge from American innovation. It came from captured enemy technology, German engineering that American soldiers had faced at Normandy and the Bulge, now turned into the backbone of the American infantry squad. 1941, the island of Crete. German paratroopers, Fallschirmjäger, dropped onto the island in the largest airborne operation in history.
They took Crete, but the cost was catastrophic. Lightly armed paratroopers, jumping with only pistols and submachine guns, were slaughtered by entrenched defenders before they could reach the weapons canisters dropped separately. The Germans never conducted another major airborne assault, but the disaster drove a requirement, a weapon that combined the firepower of a machine gun with the portability of a rifle, something a paratrooper could carry when he jumped.
Rheinmetall’s answer was the FG 42, the Fallschirmjägergewehr 42, the paratrooper rifle. A select-fire weapon with a revolutionary rotating bolt and operating rod system derived, ironically, from the American Lewis gun of World War I. It could fire fully automatic from an open bolt, preventing the cook-offs that plagued other automatic weapons during sustained fire.
American technology captured by Germans, improved, filed away for future reference. 1942, the Eastern Front. German infantry faced a different problem, overwhelming Soviet numbers. The Red Army threw waves of men at German positions. The Germans needed machine guns that could keep firing faster, longer, more reliably than anything that existed.
Mauser’s answer was the MG 42. American soldiers called its distinctive sound Hitler’s buzzsaw. The weapon fired 1,200 rounds per minute, so fast that individual shots blended into a continuous ripping scream. Its belt-feed mechanism was engineering brilliance, simple, reliable, capable of feeding ammunition faster than any previous design.
The MG 42 terrified Allied soldiers from Normandy to the Rhine. 1945 War’s end. American Ordnance teams swept through captured German facilities cataloging everything. They found the FG 42. They found the MG 42. And they recognized what they had. Two pieces of a puzzle that could create the general-purpose machine gun the US Army had never possessed.
The FG 42’s rotating bolt and operating rod reliable automatic fire from an open bolt. The MG 42’s belt feed mechanism continuous ammunition supply without magazine changes. Combine them. Re-chamber for American ammunition and you had something new. In 1946, Bridge Tool and Die Works received a contract to build the T44. A prototype that was, quite literally, a captured Type 2 FG 42 with an MG 42 feed mechanism bolted to its side.
Only one was built. It looked like something assembled in a garage, but it proved the concept worked. Through the late ’40s and early ’50s, the concept evolved. The T52 series new build prototypes retaining the hybrid design. Then the T161 series optimized for mass production. Re-chambered for the new 7.
62 by 51 mm NATO cartridge that would standardize Western ammunition. The T161E3 won comparative trials against the Belgian FN MAG, a weapon that many experts considered the superior design. The decision came down to politics, not performance. Congress wanted a domestically manufactured weapon. They did not want to pay licensing fees to a Belgian company.
On January 30th, 1957 the T161E3 was type classified as the M60. America’s first true general-purpose machine gun was born from German DNA. What made it work? The genius was combination, not invention. The FG 42’s rotating bolt allowed reliable automatic fire from an open bolt, critical for preventing cook-offs during sustained shooting.
The MG 42’s belt feed allowed continuous ammunition supply. Rechambering for 7.62 by 51 mm NATO gave the round enough energy to punch through the jungle vegetation that stopped smaller rounds cold. At 500 to 650 rounds per minute, the cyclic rate was fast enough to suppress, but slow enough that a trained gunner could fire controlled six to nine round bursts without burning through ammunition.
The weapon weighed 23 lb unloaded, heavy, but carriable by one man. The entire squad shared the burden of ammunition. Every rifleman carried an additional 200 linked rounds for the M60 in addition to their own gear. Effective range, 800 m on the bipod, 1,100 on the tripod, outranging anything the enemy carried at squad level. The 7.
62 mm NATO round, the same cartridge used in the M14 rifle, possessed enough kinetic energy to shatter cinder blocks, to punch through hardwood trees that enemy soldiers used for cover, to penetrate vegetation so dense that the M16’s 5.56 mm round deflected off branches. Every fifth round was a tracer, creating a glowing rope of light that allowed gunners to walk fire onto targets they couldn’t clearly see.
But the decision to adopt the M60 over the FN MAG would haunt the weapon throughout its service life. The M60’s barrel, gas cylinder, bipod, and front sight formed a single inseparable assembly with no carry handle. After sustained fire, the barrel glowed red. The assistant gunner needed an asbestos mitten to grasp it.
If that mitten was lost, easily done in jungle combat, changing the barrel meant grabbing 500 degrees of steel with your bare hands. Worse, removing the barrel also removed the bipod. The gun was unsupported during the change. The gunner was exposed. The gas cylinder nut loosened under sustained fire vibration. Soldiers learned to wire it in place with safety wire or coat hangers.
The sear wore down over time causing runaway gun incidents where the weapon kept firing after the trigger was released. Field expedient fixes became standard. Duct tape around the trigger group, C ration cans wired to the feed tray. These problems would plague the M60 from the jungles of Vietnam to the streets of Mogadishu three decades later.
First production guns rolled off the Springfield Armory line in December 1958. By 1965, the M60 equipped every American infantry squad deploying to Vietnam. One gun per squad, three per platoon, eight per rifle company. The captured German technology was about to be tested in combat conditions its designers never imagined.
Canopy jungle, monsoon rains, rice paddies that sucked men down to their waists, an enemy who understood exactly how dangerous the machine gunner was, and who made killing him their first priority. The M60 announced itself with a sound unlike any other weapon on the battlefield. Not the high-pitched rip of the MG42 it descended from, the Germans had deliberately slowed the cyclic rate.
Not the steady chatter of the M1919 Browning, something lower, rhythmic, a thudding grunt at roughly 550 rounds per minute, nine rounds per second. Veterans called it the grunt of a barnyard hog. The NVA called it the first thing to locate and destroy. Operation Starlight proved what the M60 could do in American hands, but the Battle of Ia Drang proved what it meant to both sides.
November 14th through 16th, 1965. Landing Zone X-Ray. Ia Drang Valley, Pleiku Province, the Central Highlands, the first major engagement between US Army forces and the North Vietnamese Army. 450 men of the 1st Battalion, 7th Cavalry, the same regiment that rode with Custer, air-assaulted into a landing zone at the base of the Chu Pong Massif.
They landed almost directly on top of three NVA regiments. M60 crews were positioned around the perimeter to provide interlocking fields of fire. Commanders understood the weapon’s value and its vulnerability. They ordered gunners to hold fire during night probes to stay hidden, to reveal their positions only during mass assaults when maximum firepower was required.
The NVA needed to locate the machine guns before they could destroy them. The machine gunners needed to stay invisible until the moment of maximum effect. Bill Beck, assistant M60 gunner, and Russell Adams gunner, served with Company A. They survived the three-day battle. At a 50th anniversary reunion, Beck recalled the experience with the flatness of a man who had processed it for decades.
We knew nothing about the battle’s eventual historical significance. It was just another day for us. Just another day, surrounded, outnumbered 10 to 1, feeding belts into a machine gun while the jungle exploded around them. On the second day, the NVA demonstrated that they understood the M60’s importance. Soldiers from the 66th Regiment overran a position held by 2nd Platoon, Bravo Company. They killed the M60 gunner.
They took his weapon, and they turned it against Alpha Company. American soldiers attempting to rescue the lost platoon found themselves taking fire from their own machine gun, the distinctive thudding unmistakable. The tracer rounds now coming toward them instead of away. The weapon that Americans used to kill NVA was now killing Americans.
It was one of the war’s documented instances of the enemy learning exactly what the M60 was worth, worth capturing, worth using, worth prioritizing above all other targets. The battle cost 79 American dead. Estimated NVA losses exceeded 600. Eight months later, July 24th, 1966, near the demilitarized zone, Quang Tri province.
Lance Corporal Richard Allen Pittman, Company I, 3rd Battalion, 5th Marines, was at the rear of his column when the lead elements walked into an ambush. NVA soldiers from the 324th Division, numerically superior, dug in, waiting. Pittman heard the firing. Then he heard the calls for help. Calls for more firepower.
He was carrying an M16. The men at the front needed something heavier. Pittman found an M60. He grabbed it. He grabbed several belts of ammunition, and he charged forward alone, directly into the ambush, under point-blank enemy fire. He silenced one enemy position, destroyed two additional automatic weapons.
The NVA, seeing a single Marine with a machine gun advancing toward them, launched a counterattack. 30 to 40 soldiers in a bold frontal assault. Pittman’s response was recorded in his Medal of Honor citation. He calmly established a position in the middle of the trail and raked the advancing enemy with devastating machine gun fire. In the middle of the trail, no cover.
One man with one weapon against 40. The M60 malfunctioned. The reliability issues that plagued the weapon throughout its service life. Pittman picked up an enemy submachine gun, then a fallen comrade’s pistol. He kept fighting. He threw his last grenade at retreating NVA soldiers. When the shooting stopped, two-thirds of his platoon were dead or wounded.
Pittman had been legally blind in one eye. The Army rejected him. The Navy rejected him. The Marines took him anyway. He retired as a master gunnery sergeant after 21 years of service. A school in Stockton, California bears his name. He died October 13th, 2016 at 71 years old. The enemy adapted fast. Victor Renza, specialist fourth class, Company B, First Battalion, Eighth Infantry, Fourth Infantry Division, carried the M60 his platoon called number one gun through the Central Highlands in 1966 and 67.
He confirmed what every M60 gunner learned. The weapon was so feared by our opponents that they usually aimed their first shots at the machine gunners. Snipers were specifically tasked with identifying and eliminating M60 gunners. By muzzle flash, by the distinctive tracer trajectory, by the sound that announced exactly where the most dangerous American in the squad was standing.
RPGs were directed at machine gun bunkers during fire base attacks. Mortar fire was pre-registered on likely M60 positions identified during reconnaissance. The practical result? M60 gunners learned to fire and move. Staying in one position after revealing yourself was suicide. The weapon proved itself beyond the infantry.
October 31st, 1966, the Mekong River, deep in the Delta. Boatswain’s Mate First Class James Elliott Williams, Willie to his crew, was commanding PBR 105 dollars, a 31-foot fiberglass patrol boat armed with twin .50 caliber machine guns and M60s mounted on port and starboard. Williams and PBR 101 were running a routine patrol when they stumbled onto something that wasn’t routine at all.
Staging areas for two entire Viet Cong regiments preparing to cross the river. Two patrol boats, 10 Americans against 2,000 enemy soldiers. Williams made a decision that defied every instinct for self-preservation. He ordered both boats to attack full speed straight through the middle of the enemy formations, every weapon firing.
The M60s on PBR 105 and 101 joined the .50 calibers in a 3-hour running battle. Williams led his boats through the enemy again and again, the gunners burning through ammunition faster than anyone had planned for, the barrels heating toward failure. When it was over, two PBRs and 10 Americans had destroyed 65 enemy boats and inflicted an estimated 1,000 to 1,200 Viet Cong casualties.
Not a single American was killed. Williams received the Medal of Honor plus a Navy Cross, two Silver Stars, and three Bronze Stars over his career. The guided missile destroyer USS James E. Williams DDG-95, commissioned in 2004, bears his name. The M60 was proving itself in the jungle, on the rivers, in the hands of men who understood what it could do.
But proving what it could do also meant proving what it cost. The enemy had learned, kill the machine gunner first. The M60’s distinctive sound was a targeting beacon. Every gunner who pulled the trigger knew he was announcing his position to men whose specific job was to kill him before he could fire again.
The armorers had a saying. They told it to every new M60 gunner who walked into their shop, “You have 7 seconds to live.” November 20th, 1967. Hill 875 near Dak To, Kontum Province. The Battle of Dak To was already one of the bloodiest engagements of the war. NVA forces had massed in the Central Highlands, four regiments, perhaps 10,000 men, in what American intelligence believed was a prelude to a major offensive. They were right.
Tet was 2 months away. Company A, 2nd Battalion, 503rd Infantry, 173rd Airborne Brigade occupied a position on the slopes of Hill 875. The terrain was brutal, steep jungle, limited visibility, no clear fields of fire. The NVA held the high ground. Private First Class Carlos James Lozada was 21 years old, born September 6th, 1946 in Caguas, Puerto Rico.
Raised in the Bronx, New York, he was an M60 gunner. And on November 20th, he was manning a four-man early warning outpost 35 m forward of Company A’s perimeter, the most exposed position, the first to make contact. At 1400 hours, an entire NVA company appeared on a trail below Lozada’s position. They were not probing, they were not reconnoitering, they were assaulting.
The enemy closed to 10 m before Lozada opened fire. 10 m, the length of a school bus, close enough to see faces. His M60 delivered what the weapon was designed to deliver, a continuous stream of 7.62 mm rounds at 550 per minute, every fifth round a tracer, creating a wall of lead across the trail that no human being could walk through and survive.
His Medal of Honor citation records what happened in the first seconds. His heavy and accurate machine gun fire killed at least 20 North Vietnamese soldiers and completely disrupted their initial attack. 20 men, one burst, the assault stopped. But the NVA did not retreat. They had been trained for this.
Kill the machine gunner first. They began enveloping Lozada’s position, attacking from three sides simultaneously, while the main force hit Company A’s west flank. Lozada was ordered to withdraw. He refused. He told his three comrades to move back. He would stay. He would provide cover. This was the M60’s terrible bargain made flesh.
The weapon was the most valuable asset in the squad, the source of suppressive firepower that allowed everyone else to maneuver, to survive. But the man behind it was marked for death from the moment he pulled the trigger. The enemy knew exactly where he was. They would concentrate everything they had on killing him. Carlos Lozada understood this.
Every M60 gunner understood this. The armorers told you when they handed you the weapon. 7 seconds. Lozada stayed anyway. He continued pouring fire from his M60, belt after belt, the barrel heating toward red, the receiver growing hot enough to burn through gloves. The jungle around him disintegrating under return fire, branches shattering, bark exploding, the air filled with splinters and fragments and the snap of rounds passing inches from his head.
He was hit. He kept firing. He was hit again. He kept firing. His comrades reached the relative safety of Company A’s perimeter. Lozada had bought them the time they needed. Now he needed to move, if he could still move. He was mortally wounded. He could no longer walk, but he had to be carried from his position.
He would not leave the gun, would not stop firing until he physically could not pull the trigger anymore. Why did one M60 stop an entire company? Because the weapon created what tacticians call a beaten zone, a continuous stream of fire that made a specific piece of terrain impassable. The NVA could not advance through it. They could not flank around it without exposing themselves to the same fire from a different angle.
Their only option was to kill the gunner, and Lozada would not let them do it before his comrades escaped. The M60 did not just suppress, it physically controlled terrain. One man, 23 pounds of German derived engineering, and the willingness to die on the gun. The battle for Hill 875 continued for 4 days.
It ultimately cost 376 Americans killed or missing, one of the highest casualty counts of any single engagement in the war. Carlos Lozada was one of three 173rd Airborne Brigade soldiers to receive the Medal of Honor for actions at Dak To. His citation concluded with words that appear on hundreds of medals, but meant something specific here.
His indomitable courage and selfless concern for his comrades at the cost of his life were in keeping with the highest traditions of the military service. Vice President Spiro Agnew presented the medal to Lozada’s parents on November 18th, 1969. He is buried in Long Island National Cemetery, Farmingdale, New York.
The Bronx street where he grew up was renamed in his honor. A US Army Reserve Center in Puerto Rico bears his name. He was 21 years old. The M60 had flaws that cost lives. The barrel change procedure was a nightmare. After 200 to 300 rounds of sustained fire, the barrel needed replacing. And the barrel, gas cylinder, bipod, and front sight were a single assembly with no carry handle.
The assistant gunner needed an asbestos mitten to grasp 500° of steel. If that mitten was lost in the chaos of combat, you grabbed the barrel bare-handed or you let the weapon overheat and fail. Removing the barrel also removed the bipod. The gun was unsupported during the change. The gunner was exposed fumbling with hot metal while the enemy kept shooting.
The sear wore down over time. The weapon could continue firing after the trigger was released. A runaway gun that emptied its belt whether you wanted it to or not. The only way to stop it was to twist the ammunition belt or let it run dry. The gas cylinder nut loosened under vibration. Soldiers wired it in place with safety wire, with coat hangers, with whatever they could find.
The trigger group was held by a fragile clip that snagged on brush and fell off entirely. Soldiers wrapped it with duct tape and cable ties. Some units wired C-ration cans to the feed tray to create a smoother ammunition path. Field expedient fixes for a weapon that should have worked out of the box. The physical toll was brutal.
The M60 generates approximately 130 decibels, far above the 85 decibel threshold for permanent hearing damage. No hearing protection was standard issue in Vietnam. John Goro Masaki, a door gunner and crew chief on UH-1C helicopter gunships, reported that the combination of rotor noise and M60 fire ruined his hearing.
Tinnitus, the constant ringing that never stops, is nearly universal among M60 operators. The weight was crushing. The weapon alone was 23 lb. Add ammunition, 200 rounds minimum, often 400 NAR, a spare barrel, water, rations, helmet, flak jacket. An M60 gunner’s combat load could exceed 60 lb of weapon-related gear alone, carried through jungle in 100° heat and 90% humidity.
Chronic back problems, shoulder injuries, knee damage that lasted decades, and then there was the psychological weight. Tony Vargas, a Marine MOS 0331 machine gunner who deployed in 1968, recalled the warning his armorer gave him. “You have 7 seconds to live. The average lifespan of the machine gunner in Vietnam was 7 seconds from the moment you pulled the trigger.
” The statistic was probably apocryphal, training folklore passed down to shock new gunners into understanding their situation, but the psychological impact was real. Every M60 gunner knew he was the priority target. Every time he fired, he announced his position to men whose specific mission was to kill him.
Vargas described the reality. You would open up and right away they would know where the M60 was because of the rounds and the rapid fire. They would spot you right away. So, what you would have to do is once you were in a firefight, you would shoot and then you would have to move. Fire and move.
Fire and move. Stay in one place and die. The movies got it wrong. Rambo hip firing an M60 while sprinting through the forest. Physically impossible for sustained accurate fire. The weapon was designed to be fired from a bipod or tripod. The recoil alone made standing fire wildly inaccurate beyond the first few rounds. Animal Mother in Full Metal Jacket, the iconic image of the M60 gunner, showed infinite ammunition and no barrel changes.
In reality, belts had to be loaded and carried by someone. Barrels needed changing every few hundred rounds of sustained fire. The image of one man with a machine gun holding off an army was real. Carlos Lozada proved that. But it was real because men like Lozada were willing to die doing it, not because the weapon made them invincible.
The enemy adapted. At Doc Toe, three sides of Lozada’s position were enveloped simultaneously. They knew exactly what they had to kill first and sometimes they succeeded. Victor Renza’s M60E, the weapon his platoon called number one gun, was captured on May 18th, 1967 near the Cambodian border. An NVA attack killed 21 of 30 men in Fourth Platoon, First Battalion, Eighth Infantry.
The M60 gunner, Joe DeLong, was taken prisoner. DeLong was killed attempting to escape from a POW camp in Cambodia. He received a posthumous Silver Star in 1974. Renza never forgot the weapon he’d carried for 7 months. Years later he wrote, “Was number one gun used to kill Americans? Was it left behind on some forgotten battlefield? Or is it on display in a Hanoi museum?” The M60 refused to die.
It served through Grenada in ’83, Panama in ’89, the Gulf War in ’91, at Mogadishu in ’93, the Black Hawk Down battle, Rangers carried M60 uses through streets filled with hostile fire, and vehicle-mounted variants supported the desperate extraction convoy. Some M60 E4 and Mark 43 variants served with Navy SEALs into Iraq and Afghanistan.
The replacement came gradually. The M249 squad automatic weapon, lighter, 5.56 mm, magazine and belt-fed die, assumed the squad automatic role in 1984. The Marines adopted the M240G for infantry use in ’91. Army competitive trials in ’94 and ’95 settled the question definitively. Over 50,000 rounds, the M240 achieved 2,962 mean rounds between stoppages.
The M60 achieved 846, more than three times the reliability. The M60 was lighter, better balanced, more controllable, but its reliability deficit was insurmountable. The Army adopted the M240B by the late ’90s, beginning with Ranger battalions. Yet, the M60 endures. In 2024, the US Army awarded a $14.
96 million contract for M60 E4 and E6 variants, reportedly for foreign military aid. The weapon that carried German DNA through Vietnam continues into its seventh decade of service. What do the veterans remember? Not the specs, not the cyclic rate or the muzzle velocity or the effective range, the weight, the sound, the responsibility.
Johnny M. Clark, Lance Corporal, 1st Battalion, 5th Marines, carried an M60 through the Tet Offensive in 1968. He was wounded three times. Silver Star, three Purple Hearts, Vietnamese Cross of Gallantry. He wrote a memoir called Guns Up, the battle cry that sent machine gunners racing to the front, now in its 34th printing, on the Marine Commandant’s recommended reading list.
Clark remembered what they told him when he received his weapon. The life expectancy of a machine gunner in Vietnam was 7 to 10 seconds after a firefight began. Victor Renzo remembered the bond. By the time we reached Vietnam, I felt the gun had become a part of me. And the exhaustion after 7 months of carrying it, of being the priority target, of knowing every firefight might be his last. I didn’t want any medals.
I just wanted to get off number one gun before my luck ran out. Harold Haas, sergeant, 101st Airborne Division, carried an M60 through the A Shau Valley in ’68, some of the worst fighting of the war. The eldest of eight children from a Kansas farm, drafted into a nightmare. His summary, “I wouldn’t take a million dollars to do it again, but I’m glad I did it and got through it.
” Richard Hagan, M60 gunner with the 502nd Infantry, 101st Airborne, described what it meant to carry the weapon. “Many times under fire, they had me move to the front to lay down fire to help my pinned down soldiers. The second I opened fire without question, a hail of bullets would rain down directed at me.
I lived long enough to be prepared for this and would immediately return fire within milliseconds. It was this quick response that saved my life.” John Goro Masaki, on the euphemism they used for what the M60 did. “Come on, if you’re going to fire a weapon at the enemy, don’t you mean to fire and kill them? It’s a play on words, I suppose.
Tony Vargas on a moment that stayed with him for 50 years, a VC soldier surrendering, a Marine screaming at him to shoot, I pointed my machine gun at him and one of the Marines was saying, “Shoot him. Shoot him.” For what must have been just a couple of seconds, I stood there. I thank God to this day that I didn’t pull the trigger.
Victor Renza after he finally got off number one gun and picked up an M-16. It felt like a feather in comparison. Hill 875, November 20th, 1967. The grunt of the pig echoing through monsoon darkened jungle. Tracer rounds cutting through vegetation at 2800 ft per second. A 21-year-old from the Bronx refusing to withdraw, feeding belt after belt into a weapon that made him the most important man on that hillside and the first one the enemy had to kill.
The M-60 was not the most destructive weapon of the Vietnam War. That distinction belongs to B-52 strikes, to artillery, to napalm, but at the squad level, in the jungle, on the river, in the helicopter door, no weapon shaped more individual engagements or demanded more of its operators. Carlos Lozada knew what would happen when he opened fire.
He opened fire anyway. That’s what the men who carried the pig remember. Not the specifications, not the flaws, not the field expedient fixes or the hearing damage or the weight that never left their shoulders, the weight of being the one who stayed on the gun.
